The Twilight Empire

by Alec Hutson

  “She belongs to all Zim!” roars the Prophet, spittle spraying.

  “Enough!” cries the emperor, coming to his feet. The cat rises as well, its hackles up, and for the first time I see that there’s a golden chain connecting the beast to the throne.

  The Prophet is quivering with rage, and I half expect him to rush at the abbess.

  “Ezekal,” the emperor begins in a commanding tone. “You know that the Umbra has the same sway in this court as you do. I will not order Abbess Zaria to give up this girl now” – he turns to the shadowdancer, his eyes flashing – “but that does not mean I will not in the future. I need time to reflect on these matters.”

  “Your Grace, there is little time.” The Prophet has controlled himself, all traces of his anger vanished.

  “You heard me,” the emperor snaps back. “I will not rush to a decision. My father put far more trust in the Umbra than he ever did with you, Ezekal. You claim your long life shows you have the favor of the gods, but the shadowdancers say the same about their abilities, and they have done more great services for the throne than you ever have. All I receive from you are premonitions of doom and destruction. One month. If the world has not ended by then, I will have an answer to what this girl’s fate will be.” Finished, the emperor sinks back onto his throne, his back straight and his head high.

  The Prophet bows low, then, without a glance at the abbess, he whirls on his heel and starts to descend the tiered dais. When he reaches the bottom, his Daughters close around him and the nobles draw back as he makes his way back towards the arched entrance to the great hall.

  My head is tingling, and I feel almost dizzy. I put my hand out to keep from falling over, lightly touching Auxilia’s arm. She glances at me in shock, but that quickly turns to concern.

  “Are you all right?” she murmurs.

  “Yes,” I manage, but my voice is barely a whisper. What is going on?

  I glance towards the abbess of the Umbra, but she has vanished. I cast my gaze around. Where had she gone?

  My eyes are drawn to the great black alethian striding in the wake of the Prophet and his Daughters. There’s someone beside the lizard man, wrapped in layers of gray clothes. No, there isn’t. Pain spikes in my head. Yes, there is, a figure so swaddled in cloth that no flesh is showing, and with a broad-brimmed hat that shadows its face. But my eyes want to slide over this man without stopping, as if he isn’t truly present.

  Another wash of cold surprise when I suddenly realize when I’ve felt like this before – in the Last Word, when I glimpsed the Shriven lurking in the corner of the common room.

  A Voice walks with the Prophet of Zim.

  18

  “Who is the Prophet?”

  Auxilia regards me from over the lip of a silver wine glass. She’s comfortably ensconced in a nest of satin pillows and tangled silken sheets, and I’m pacing back and forth across her chambers, my body thrumming with restless energy. My thoughts are swirling with what I saw in the emperor’s audience chamber.

  “I had hoped you could tell me,” she replies.

  I pause, putting my hands on one of the twisting gold bedposts. “You said he simply appeared?”

  Auxilia takes a quick sip. Her lips are already stained blue from the wine she’s drinking. What happened in the palace unsettled her, and after arriving again at the Orthonos estate she retreated to her chamber with a decanter of Ysalan azure . . . and me. “He did. Centuries ago. Some believe he is replaced by another when he grows too old. Others truly think he’s the same man, and it is the blessing of the lost gods that keep him from aging.”

  “And what do you believe?”

  She shifts uncomfortably. “I was raised by my mother, the old matriarch, with the belief that he is an elaborate fraud. Many of the most powerful houses believe the same. We put our faith in the emperor and the Umbra. But now . . . I don’t know. I have seen things I cannot explain. He seems to have powers greater than any man.”

  For a brief moment I consider telling her everything: about the Shriven, the dying world, and the man who claimed to be my brother. Something holds my tongue. Perhaps she’ll think me mad, or offer me up to the Prophet in an attempt to curry favor. But I have to know about the Voice.

  “I saw something,” I venture slowly. “A . . . man. He was wrapped in robes, and moved with the Prophet’s followers. There was something strange about him. My eyes wanted to slide over him, and he made my skin prickle.”

  Auxilia is staring at me intently now. “The Stranger. They say he walks invisibly at the Prophet’s side, his guardian and confidant. Some have said to glimpse him out of the corner of their eyes, and when they turn to see him clearly, nothing is there. If he is real, he has strange powers.”

  “Like causing paralysis. Holding others against their will with his mind alone.”

  The matriarch’s eyes widen. “How do you know this?”

  “I have encountered another creature like this. I watched it die.”

  Auxilia sets her wine glass down carefully. She looks shaken. “Then you claim the Stranger was not sent by the gods to watch over the Prophet?”

  “No. Something else.”

  “Something evil? Something that would harm Zim?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you are insinuating the Prophet himself is a threat to the Twilight Empire.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  Auxilia blinks quickly, as if trying to order her churning thoughts. “Such an idea . . . many would kill you for voicing it. A large part of the empire believes he is our only hope at salvation.”

  “But not the Umbra.”

  Auxilia’s face twists when I name the home of the shadowdancers. There’s anger there, and something else as well. “The Umbra has never accepted the Prophet. And as the only believers who retained their powers after the gods left, they have their own support in the empire. But their true motives are as opaque as the Prophet’s.”

  “Why do you dislike them?”

  The matriarch’s eyes flash. “That is none of your concern, slave.” Her voice is hard now. Cold. “But believe me when I say I would rather throw in my lot with the Prophet and his zealots than those spiders that lurk in the shadows, spinning their webs.”

  “But I –”

  “Enough,” Auxilia snaps, picking up her wine again. “You have disturbed my mood. Leave me, Talin. But when next I call upon you, I will get what answers you have about the Prophet, and you will never bring up the Umbra again without my permission. Do you understand?”

  I give a quick nod, my mind roiling. Clearly ancient enmities run deep in Zim, and the Orthonos and the Umbra have been at odds in the past.

  “Now leave.”

  I manage a shallow bow and then retreat from Auxilia’s chambers. My last glimpse of the matriarch is of her staring into the distance, her mouth set in a thin line, and then the door of carved black wood thuds shut. I stand there, staring at the fanciful scenes carved into the grain, until one of the Zimani warriors flanking the door clears his throat meaningfully.

  Apparently, when Swords are thrown out of the mistress’s bedchambers, they aren’t supposed to linger.

  “All right, all right,” I murmur, turning away. The golden stone of the corridors is cool beneath my feet, and I realize that I’ve left my ridiculous slippers inside Auxilia’s room. Ah well. With a sigh, I start back towards my own chambers. There’s no handmaiden or Irix to guide me this time, and I fully expect to get lost within this labyrinth of a manse, but I truly do not care. Perhaps a bit of aimless wandering will help me work through this cascade of strange revelations.

  The Prophet is accompanied by one of the same creatures that consumed the world in which I first awoke. Valyra is alive and is under the protection of the abbess of the Umbra. The Prophet wants to claim her – does this mean the Shriven are seeking Valyra as well? And do the Prophet’s silver eyes mean he and I come from the same tribe? The one the priest of the copper-eyed people said had betrayed their wo
rld and abandoned it to the Shriven? If the Prophet had seen me standing beside Auxilia, would he have recognized me? I half wish I’d somehow drawn the man’s attention, just to see his reaction.

  “Talin?”

  I stop as suddenly as if the Shriven’s unnatural power had seized my limbs. Surprise washes through me in a cold wave. That voice . . . but it’s impossible.

  I turn around slowly. At the other end of the corridor, a lanky Zimani woman has appeared. She’s dressed in robes of pale pink, and her hair is bound up in a silver weave inset with glimmering amethysts. She takes a tentative step forward, peering at me like she can’t believe her eyes.

  And neither can I.

  “Xela?”

  “Oh, by the dark!” she cries, and then she’s running toward me. I have just a bewildered moment to try and order my whirling thoughts before her long arms wrap around me.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispers fiercely.

  “What are you doing here?” I reply, still in shock.

  She pulls away, rubbing at her face, and looks me up and down. “You’re dressed like a fop,” she says critically. “You’re dressed like . . .” Her eyes widen. “A Sword.”

  “I am a Sword,” I say quickly. “How did you find me?”

  “I wasn’t . . .” Xela sees something, and I turn to find one of Auxilia’s handmaidens hovering at the end of the corridor watching us.

  “Oh, Saints,” the shadowdancer hisses through gritted teeth. Then she draws herself up. “I see you lurking. Run away, and if you tell the matriarch I’m back I’ll have you flayed.”

  The girl blanches and scurries off.

  “You know her?”

  Xela grimaces. “I grew up with her. She’s a gossipy little twit, and once my threat wears off she’ll go running right to Mother.”

  “Mother?”

  Xela sighs. “I am the daughter of Auxilia Orthonos, though she may have disavowed me by now.”

  I can’t help but goggle at her. “What?”

  The shadowdancer grabs me roughly by the arm and starts to lead me down a side passage. “I feel like I’m dreaming,” she mutters. “Or having a night terror.”

  “Where is Deliah? And Bell?”

  “They are fine,” Xela replies, glancing around a corner. “Or as fine as a crazy red warrior and a maudlin drunk can expect to be.”

  “Why didn’t you come after me?”

  Xela gives me a look that makes me wish I could bite back what I just said. “Why didn’t you come find us? We thought you were dead at first. And then Fen caught your scent in the grasslands –”

  “Wait, Fen Poria?”

  “Yes, she’s with us now. She tracked you to Zim, but then lost your trail in the city . . . we’ve been tearing the place apart but it’s like you’d vanished without a ripple. And you were here the whole time?” She throws out her arms in exasperation to indicate the manse.

  “Not the whole time. I was a mucker -”

  “A mucker? The ones who go into the sewers?” Her beautiful almond eyes – so much like her mother’s, I now realize – widen again. “Wait, were you the one who saved my cousin’s life?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  Xela has to put an arm out to steady herself, nearly knocking over a porcelain vase. “I just heard . . . it’s why I came back here. I’d been steeling myself for a fight to shake this old place to its foundations, and then I saw you . . .” She passes a hand across her face. Then she shoves me hard in the chest. “But how could you abandon us like that?”

  I point to my ankle, and she gasps. “You’re wearing a circle? You’re a slave?”

  “I was found by slavers after I tumbled off the cliff. They said by the laws of Zim I owed a life debt to them.”

  She looks stricken for a moment, and then her surprise and horror melt away, replaced by anger. “How dare they?” she mutters. “How dare my mother?” She glances murderously in the direction that leads to Auxilia’s chambers.

  “She’s treated me well –”

  Xela cuts me off with a slash of her hand. “She knew what she was doing. You saved her nephew and she could easily have asked for the emperor to intercede and end your life debt. But you had something she wanted” – she gives me a long, measuring look – “so instead she kept you in shackles.”

  She jabs a finger into my chest. “Go back to your chambers. You’re in the Sword quarters, yes? I’ll join you shortly.”

  “I –”

  She’s already turning away. With practiced ease she scoops a clump of darkness from behind an ornate candelabra and begin slathering it across her arm, which is soon sheathed in rippling darkness.

  “Go,” she says again. “And gather your things.”

  I’ve worn a furrow in the carpet of my bedchamber when the door finally opens and a shadow slips through it. A hazy pink is just visible beneath the black, like something submerged beneath dark water. With a shake, bits of shadow drift away, revealing Xela’s sharp features, and she quickly rubs at her limbs to remove the rest of the clumped darkness.

  “Did you speak with her?” I ask her, and she stares at me for a moment like I’m an idiot.

  “Of course not. We’ve been estranged for five years – I’m not about to have you be the first thing we talk about.”

  “Then what –”

  I gasp as Xela withdraws a small silver sphere from a pocket of her robes. There’s an answering thrum in the circlet around my ankle, as if my shackles also recognize this thing.

  “You found it?”

  Xela nods, looking satisfied. “It’s the only one she bothered to keep in her vault of most precious treasures. Well, I assume it’s yours.” She crouches down beside me, holding the sphere pinched between thumb and forefinger.

  “What if it’s the wrong one?”

  She shrugs. “I suppose the circle might snap shut. I’m not sure, to be honest.”

  “Then perhaps we should wait . . .”

  But she’s already pressing the sphere to the silver anklet; it quivers violently, and for a brief, terrifying moment I’m sure I’m going to lose my foot, but then the circlet snaps open and falls away.

  By all the dead gods, I’m free. I jerk my leg away from the inert circle like it’s a venomous snake. A tingling sense of unreality passes through me, and I can’t keep myself from shuddering. After all this time, my life is my own again. The horrible helplessness I’ve felt since that night in the slaver’s tent is finally gone.

  I want to find my friends.

  “Thank you,” I say to Xela, my voice cracking slightly.

  She gives me a lopsided smile and runs a hand through her silky black hair. “Let’s get moving. I know some people who will be excited to see you again.”

  We slip from the Orthonos manse cloaked in shadow, climbing over the low walls that seem more decorative than practical, and move through the city as the late afternoon light gilds the great towers rising around us. Xela peppers me with questions as we push through the jostling crowds and dodge trundling carts. What happened in the grasslands? Who bought my life debt from the Zimani slavers? What was the undercity like, and what happened the day I rescued her cousin from the depths?

  She gasps when I tell her about the attack on the caravan by the grass kraken – apparently, the ladies had stumbled across the detritus from the ambush, smears of blood and great ballista bolts buried in the earth. But they had only been sure I was alive when Fen Poria sniffed my scent at one of the campsites hacked from the grass – I remember Ximachus letting us out to attend to our needs, and I wonder how I would have felt at the time if I knew that was what would let my friends know I was still alive. Thinking of that night reminds me of Bright Eyes, and I feel a stab of sadness. I tell Xela of the kvah, and the pirate mucker Shalloch and Vesivia, and the strange things we encountered under the teeming streets of Zim.

  Xela glances at me skeptically when I speak of Bright Eyes, but she does not interrupt. I want to make her understand the depths of the k
vah’s honor – sacrificing herself to save a child of the people who had murdered her family and enslaved her – but I can’t seem to put my feelings into the proper words. At least she does not scoff when I tell her of the friendship that had grown between us.

  I want to ask the shadowdancer all sorts of questions – about her noble past, her reasons for joining the Umbra, and what led to this rift between her and her mother, let alone why she traveled south to serve the Contessa – but before I can begin my interrogation she announces that we’ve arrived. It’s a ramshackle structure in an insalubrious part of the city; the towers that bristle in the richer districts have become sparser, the roads here are pocked and broken, and the listing buildings sag against each other like exhausted drunkards.

  An inn, I think, though there’s no sign above the doorway, which is recessed within the bony jaws of some long-death behemoth. A few yellowing teeth the length of my forearm curve down from the top of the doorway, though the remnants of the thing’s mouth is large enough that they still wouldn’t come close to touching my hair if I passed inside.

  The strange entrance draws my attention, but there’s something happening in the road outside the establishment. A crowd has gathered around a pair of circling warriors – one is a Zimani clad in the rich vestments of a noble or fop, a silver rapier in his hand, and the other is a pale man with dark hair and darker eyes, his clothing little more than sewn furs. In his hands he twirls a pair of double-bladed battle-axes, flourishing them as he shuffles his feet in the dirt.

  “Oh, more idiots,” Xela sighs. “How tiresome.”

  The hooting crowd is showering the duelists with demands for blood, and for a moment I think this must be some Zimani tradition I haven’t encountered yet. An accepted way of settling grievances, perhaps.

  Then I see her. Seated at a small table on a balcony hanging over the roaring bones, a bottle of pale green liquid in front of her. Deliah’s not paying attention to the circling warriors, but every once in a while one of them steals a quick glance over to see if she’s watching yet.